So I’ve made the move home from Gloucestershire back to Lancashire!
Of course I had left everything to the last minute on the day mum came down to
collect me and my mountains of stuff (my mountain of stuff and I?). My room was a mess, a very small bundle
set aside for the charity shop, I was slightly hungover from drinks the night before and was
sleeping next to all my clothes that had been yanked out of the wardrobe. I
woke up at 9am, text mum and asked if she could text me with her estimated time
of arrival so I could have time to have a scout around and make sure it was all
mum-safe. I was expecting around 12pm, then I received a very relaxed text
saying yep, I’ll be there in half an hour!

WHAT?!

What time did she wake up?!?! I live 3 hours away! All
systems go, jump out of bed and get ready and there she is at the door,
cleaning products in arm. And gosh darn she’s good at what she does.

Welcome, Ma!

We packed
up the room, drove to the charity shops and dropped off a roomful of things,
stopped at the tip and threw away some non-cherished items (never one to
miss a learning opportunity, she made me do a lap to see the amount of things
that are thrown away and destined for the landfill and let me tell you: it’s
pretty fricken bad. All those crappy plastic storage things I’d bought to hoard
all my things away in, I never want to buy plastic again!). She had a walk
around the park whilst I said some poignant goodbyes, we went into town and
sold my Xbox (£20 which was fine, but Alan Wake sold for 60p, 60 PENCE! It’s
such a good game!), popped into Specsavers to move my subscription to up north (leaving
it till the last 3 hours, well done Jess).

Then back home, we had some tea,
moved everything out to the car, borrowed some allen keys from some friendly
neighbourhood motorcyclists, deep cleaned the room and we were done! Woke up
the housemates from a nap to say goodbye (I know, ruthless) and off we drove into the sunset.

Thanks Ma, for your 12 hour+ day spent moving your favourite daughter back to the homestead!

Ahhh fack. I was going to write a profound, epic post about how in November me and Jonny broke up and ended our relationship of 3 years, had a sitcom-ready situation of living together for a few months, then I moved out into a new place from January to present, and now I'm all ready to pack up out of Cheltenham, move back home, save up and go travelling!

Phew! Think how many posts I could have got out of that debacle?!

Except I really don't think I can talk about it knowing that Jonny wouldn't be able to see it, and then what would run across his mind if he did happen to come across it. I think the only way I could have done it fairly would have been to give Jonny his own little guest post and say HEY JONNY, how exactly has the past few months been for you, tell us all about it!

Coming across something about you in third person would be weird as hell, especially how break-ups are weird as hell to begin with. However everything has worked out okay, nothing went to shit and not a mean word was said, which is pretty much as good as it gets!

But I think it's made both of us go, okay SLIGHT plan change, now what do I wanna do? And that, I can talk about.

My bessie boo has been planning a travelling trip since Uni, and had asked me if I wanted to go a few times. I had always been trying too hard to pay off my student overdraft to even consider it (seriously Jess, it wasn't free money!). But now that I was moving out and thinking of my next step, I thought hey I could move home rent-free, bill-free, and have a real go at saving and embrace an adventure! I think Jonny is planning the same with San Francisco in mind, which he's always wanted to do.

Sooo. A couple of plans are in order:
1. Save. Ohhhhhhh my god I need to save. I'm gonna get tight as hell with my spending. Just so you all know how serious I am about this, yesterday I got a 20% off including sale items email from Pretty Little Thing, and didn't even look. OFF THE SALE, guys! It never includes the sale! So yes, I've got naughty habits with spending and it's gotta stop. This is especially difficult because I'm moving away from Cheltenham, where I've lived for 7 years and made friends, and I want to do loads of nice things as a goodbye. But we'll see!

2. Sell, use or clear out. Turns out, as I found out when I was moving, I own a lotta lotta stuff. I'm a sucker for sales and books and I loooove trinkets and notepads and clothes and makeup. It took quite a few car journeys to move my stuff over and I really have to downsize. So I'm going to get minimalist! (Yeah right, I'm just going to aim for a normal person amount of stuff. A smart goal is a realistic one!)

3. Skill up! So I've rattled on before about how there's loads I want to learn and how difficult it is (spoiler: it's really fricking difficult, I just talk about it and don't do anything, a charlatan!). But there's stuff like photography I wanna get down before heading off to somewhere where there will be beautiful-vistas aplenty.

And because we all love a bit of quantitative data, I'm going to track it all and keep a progress report!